“I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand.”

—Mark Twain

English: Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Marketers have mined social media data for “influencers” for years. To identify those people whose favorable tweets and posts can boost your sales, you need to be able to measure the influence of your customers.

A tool like Klout measures the influence of a person, based on popularity and potential reach in social media. But popularity and influence do not necessarily align.

If you plan to buy a tennis racket it is unlikely you follow Oprah’s advice on which brand to pick just because she has a Klout of 92. You’d rather listen to David Ferrer’s advice, Klout 73, for that choice. And still, you might just buy what your friend Carlos, who is a tennis pro, posts in a forum despite he has a Klout of 36.

Klout’s measure of influence is too shallow to give you the insight you need to figure out who influences your customers and how.

These 7 dimensions provide a framework to better understand influence in social media:

1. Activity: how active a user is in a social networks is the simplest measure of influence. Combined with reach, it provides a basic two-dimensional model.

2. Maximum reach: Understanding the potential impact of a user post will depend on factors such as number of followers, his recent influence upon them (number of RTs, favorites, lists) and the number of high-influencers among his following. The potential maximum reach of a user translates into what we could call OTSS (Opportunity To be Seen Socially)

3. Social role: Malcolm Cladwell in The Tipping Point, defined 3 types of roles played by key actors in social epidemics. It maps perfectly into social media roles:

   • Connectors, or people that know who is who and who does what and can reach to them

   • Mavens, or “information specialists”, or people that know the marketplace on their area of expertise and are willing to share what they know.

   • Salespersons or “persuaders”, charismatic persons that makes other want to agree with them

4. Authority: One of the key principles of persuasion in Cialdini’s work Influence. Authority is not universal, but rather linked to a subject. The authority of an user, can only be asserted as it relates to a subject. Mossberg’s authority in consumer gadgets will influence me in what tablet I choose to buy, but his opinion on a brand of jeans might be irrelevant to me. Oprah’s authority in regards with tennis rackets will not influence you as much as an ATP tennis player recommendation.

5. Intimacy / affinity: Nielsen says that 26% of people are more likely to pay attention to an ad that has been posted by one of their social network acquaintances. If the tennis pro is my friend, then his chances to influence my buying decision will be higher than those coming from a pro unknown to me. How close you are to a person, and how many things you have in common will increase the likelihood you pay attention.

6. Context: A given topic, time and place define a context in which the influence of a person can spark. Three examples of the role of context:

   • During the Egyptian revolution, the tweets from Tahrir Square provided live coverage during the protests and raised awareness regarding the protests.

   • A person that suffers a customer care issue with a brand, can see his level of influence multiplied in a topic related to his issue.

   • A person who is actively searching for the best tennis racket in the market, and posts a comparison of his findings in a forum, becomes an authority for a while. Once he’s made his purchase, he won’t maintain his comparison and his influence will diminish. As the web becomes a stream of content, the real-time dimension of influence becomes crucial.

7. Stickiness of the message. Is the message memorable? The impact of a message will not only be linked to how many times it was displayed and how many people it reached. How effective is the message to trigger action? How effectively is it retained? If it is worth a remark, the same message will reappear in social media and influence new contexts. Sticky stories work in setting trends. Being able to identify them early gives you an edge.

Social Media is a powerful source of insight. For making business decisions in designing and measuring campaigns, in segmenting the market, or in customer care, you need a deeper understanding of influence in social media.

Have you asked yourself, what opportunities you are missing for not dealing with the true influencers to your brand? What advantage would your competitor get by mapping the top influencers in every context? Can you afford it?

You do not need to be a millennial to ask yourself that question.
The digital revolution has brought an era where rules are changing and change is the rule.

Social Media gives a loud voice to independent artists, to social activists, to entrepreneurs. It is a Digital Renaissance.

Though it can be a long and tough way, it has never been easier to become an Indie artists or a social entrepreneur: musicians, authors, film-makers, graphic designers, app developers, DIY rocket scientists…

Millennials do not work just for money and status. They want to make a difference. They want to change the world for better.

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You cannot measure the real views,
You cannot measure or track the response from the viewer,
You cannot make it interactive,
You cannot personalize to a profile, not even to a microsegment,
You cannot do remarketing,
Yet… you, marketers, still pay more for Print Media Ads. Far more.*
Why?

The reason men oppose progress is not that they hate progress, but that they love inertia.
—Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

Nowadays, would Wanamaker allow not to know which half of his ad money is wasted?**

* According to the chart from Business Insider the Cost-per-mille (CPM) of Newspaper ads is around 10 times the CPM of Desktop/iPad ads —and about 50 times the mobile CPM.
** “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
—John Wanamaker (1838-1922)
*** You can write the exact post for traditional TV ad rates Vs. Online Video ad rates.
Can any marketer explain why the insistence of making Wanamaker’s quote remain true 100 years after it was made?

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• TV Commercials versus Digital Advertising – (by @baekdal)

So does the main character in this book.

Digital Renaissance is a story about a young engineer that finds his dream job in a startup accelerator in Shanghai. Soon he discovers he is working for the dark side. Things get worse when a colleague dies in strange circumstances.

It’s a story about being true to yourself and standing for your own beliefs.

Until March 20th, Digital Renaissance goes from $5.99 to $0.00. Don’t miss the chance to download it for free.

Enjoy reading!

You do NOT need a Kindle to read the book! You can still read it for free on any computer or tablet using Amazon’s free software available here: http://amzn.to/13aluuF

Digital Consumer Spending for a cord-cutter.

I spend $40 a month on fixed broadband. That includes a bundle for voice minutes that you can’t opt out of.

On mobile I pay another $40 a month. You get a bundle of 500 minutes and mobile broadband for 500MB. I’d like to opt out voice, but I do not dare to because mobile networks coverage is far more reliable for voice than for data, and because of the cap in mobile data. That might change one day with LTE.

But I digress, let me go to he point. At $80 a month, you pay almost $1000 a year to a telco for connectivity —although that includes voice too.

How much do you pay for the services that connect you to friends, store your files, let you share your photos, videos, ideas? In other words, how much do you pay for Gmail, Dropbox, Google Drive, YouTube, Maps, iCloud, Whatsapp, Instagram, Skype, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin? Most likely you pay zero, unless you are one of the few paying premium upgrades.

And the best part about all these Internet Services from the cloud, is that no matter what telco you choose to churn into, all those services follow you. Without any migration, without you noticing any impact.

Why would you want any of these services to be attached to a telco? Why would you want to hinder your bargaining power for the bulk of your digital expense, connectivity?

If your services are over-the-top (OTT), decoupled from any telco, you are free to bargain for a lower price for those $1000 a year you pay them. As a consumer, you prefer the telco to be a commodity. That gives you buying power.

Add to that a history of telcos abusing on roaming fees or with the expensive mobile data packages of early days. For many people, the perception is that telcos charge you for what Internet players give you for free. Leave aside that Internet startups have beaten corporate R&D departments on innovation, seen from the consumer angle.

Consumers see OTTs as a way to counter balance the historical telco power. Same goes for Cable.

This is bad news for telcos, in the long run. As of today, telcos still grab the biggest piece of consumer spending in Digital. The problem in the long run is that as connectivity gets commoditized, all the new services with their promising revenue will be OTT.  For a telco there are two options, either playing the OTT game too, or prepare to run the business as a pure utility.

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• Asymmetric business models and the true value of innovation

Telefónica – Spain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Clouds and Pipes. That’s what telecom has become. Services go over-the-top (OTT) and telcos provide connectivity. Telcos have fought a battle for more than a decade to retain Services and they lost. Only Voice and IPTV represent significant business other than connectivity.

Not even the assets they had at the time of the first cloud and pipes post are an advantage anymore:

• Telcos do not have a billing relationship any better than iTunes/App Store, Google Play, Skype and many other OTT.
• Telcos brand is perceived by consumers as ‘you-pay-for-all’ vs Internet freemium everywhere.
• The only reason voice is still with telcos is because of clever bundles of minute plans. And IPTV in most markets resulted in a must-have bundle just to sell broadband.

Telefonica does well to try and play the OTT game too with a separate entity, Telefonica Digital. It’s the only chance to be anything other than a pipe.

As per RCS, forget about it. This was invented when Nokia ruled. In a post-iPhone world with Facebook and Twitter native support, what does RCS has to offer to a user?

Update: Check out Telefonica Digital Tu Go. That’s a good example of making OTT work for a carrier.
This app enables you to have OTT voice with your phone number when on Wifi. That is a far simpler and lower cost approach to poor 3G coverage indoor than deploying femto-cells.

Coming soon:
Clouds and Pipes: The End of Telecom as we knew it.
You can get an early copy of the book and contribute with comments by subscribing to the blog by email.

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Prediction is hard, specially when it’s about the future.

The chart shows the incredible growth of mobile commerce. Excited? Well, not so much. It’s all driven by the iPad. When ten years ago many analyst predicted that mobile-commerce would be the future, few actually meant tablets to be part of the story?

One thing is that Steve Job presented the iPad and the Macbook Air as mobile devices. Another thing is that for digital marketing purposes, analyst consider it so.

Despite sharing the same OS as the iPhone, the use of an iPad is actually closer to a laptop than to a smartphone. I often buy from Amazon using my iPad instead of my laptop, even when at home. Same for online banking. In both cases, I use the original website, not the mobile one. When I am on the go, the iPhone is always with me, but not the iPad. When I am sitting in a Starbucks I may take an iPad, but still, it replaces the laptop rather than the mobile phone.

Categorizing the iPad as mobile is misleading. The use of a tablet differs from. If you are making decisions on your ad budget based on an analyst that categorizes iPad as mobile, think twice.

That said, technology-wise it has a big implication. Kill your Adobe Flash site if you haven’t yet. Just bet on HTML5 for all versions of your site, mobile, tablet, laptop-desktop or TV.

YouTube localization (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Youtube turns 8 in a few days. Just a kid, but mature enough to tell us what the future of TV will look like.

According to eMarketer, in 2012 advertising spending on online video in the US was $2.9bn. A sizable market, but less than 5% of the $65bn spent on TV ads. 

Not too impressive if it were not because online video grew by 47% year on year. At that rate of growth, it would just take 8 years for online video to surpass TV ads spending. Just by the time Youtube would turn 16.

And there are reasons to believe that the 47% growth we saw this year is just accelerating, led by YouTube. Here are 3 reasons why Youtube will drive an even bigger growth:

1. Better ads.

• Advertisers are increasing their spending.  ”YouTube is [...] home for major brand advertisers.  On YouTube, our top 100 global advertisers spent over 50% more in 2012 than they did in 2011,” they said in their last earnings call.
• Ads are getting better both for user experience, and for brands. Advertisers like the new TrueView skippable ad format, through which they only pay if viewers watch the ad. 
  
• The potential of Google to better targeting ads to user profiles and context is unmatched.

2. Better Content.

• Growing number of Professional content available: VEVO and Liga BBVA are just two fine examples I love.
• Perfect platform for amateurs to turn pros with an ad-based business model
• Youtube could soon enter the paid-for-content subscription model. This hints they could start making deals for live sport events, one of the strongholds of Pay-TV operators.

3. Better Features.

• HD at 1080p is a reality.
• Multiscreen is a reality. Same content on mobile, tablets, PC and TV
• Social is embedded and there are huge potential for “second screen” options that could potentially integrate better with online TV than with traditional TV

Online TV and traditional TV borders will blur. And when they do, Online has all the advantages to win.

 Milestones in Youtube early life:

• First video uploaded (“Me at the zoo”) in April 2005
• Google buys Youtube in October 2006
• 720p launched in December 2008
• One billion daily views in October 2009
• 1080p Full HD launched in November 2009
• 2 billion daily views in May 2010
• Trueview ads launched in December 2010
• 3 billion daily views in May 2011
• 4 billion daily views in January 2012
• First video to reach 1 billion views: Gangam Style – PSY, December 2012
• #2 search engine (bigger than Bing, Yahoo, ASK and AOL combined)
• 800 Million+ monthly unique visitors in January 2013

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See those huge growth peaks in 2008, 2010 and 2011? They are the result of two products that changed two industries forever: mobile and personal computing.

The chart just shows what’s normal when you hit a homerun with a product that shakes an entire industry:

- in 2008, it’s the iPhone 3G
- in 2010 and 2011 it’s the iPad and iPad 2

You can only get that type of growth when you launch a new product that creates a new market category by itself.
Is the current growth of “only 20%” a sign that Apple is losing its mojo? No.
Can you expect Apple to grow at 70-80% YoY as they did in the past without releasing a new breakthrough product? No.
Is there any product in the pipe with such a potential? I don’t think so. TV is in the radar, but I wouldn’t bet on it to be as big. Google/Youtube seems in better position to disrupt TV — and I don’t mean Google TV.

Apple’s stock price has dropped 35% since September, reducing in $250 billion the company’s market cap.

The market is just coming to terms with the fact that you don’t change an entire industry as big as mobile and personal computing every couple of years.  Not even if you are Apple. The growth Apple had was exceptional, and you can’t expect it to continue at that rate just with new versions of iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Anyway, a 20%+ growth YoY without any new bomb product, is a growth most companies only dream of. And Apple mindshare of higher-income customers looks intact.

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Manage Infinite Data. Get answers.

Many CIOs and CMOs may feel overwhelmed about the hype on Big Data. The sentence above gives some more clarity on top of the traditional 3Vs, that IBM even turns into four:

• Volume : Mass quantity of data that technologies today can handle. Virtually unlimited.
• Variety :Iintegrate and analyze data from an array of structured and un-structured data sources, including: databases, sensors, video, log files, clicks and more.
• Velocity : High speed at which data is created, processed and analyzed, allowing for real-time answers based on real-time streaming sources.
• Veracity :  Managing the reliability and predictability of data sources.

Here is the landscape of companies in different segments of Big Data, from Dave Feinleib for Forbes. The two layers down take care of  ”managing infinite data”. The two layers above are teh ones to “get answers.”

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